"Plants trees and algae do it. Even some bacteria and moss do it, but scientists have had a difficult time developing methods to turn sunlight into useful fuel. Now,
Penn State researchers
have a proof-of-concept device that can split water and produce recoverable hydrogen."

What's the one senseful thing to do if you live anywhere remotely near a pub called "The Rhino"? Exactly, you go there to talk about
Rhino
and the wonderful things you can do with it on the server-side thanks to
Helma
. For example, you can do this at
The Rhino in Toronto
, where
Kristan "Krispy" Uccello
initiated a meetup of Javascript geeks to take place every second Monday evening of the month.

The next
Ajax Pub Nite
is February 11, 2007 at 7pm in Toronto at The Rhino.

If you live at the other end of the world, I'm sure
Maksim Lin's talk on Web Development with Helma
would be another excellent opportunity for Rhino chatter. I assume that takes place somewhere in Melbourne, Australia, but the exact place and time is yet to be announced.

Then there would be another chance at the
OpenExpo in Berne
, Switzerland, where I'll be presenting the Helma project on the 12th and 13th of March 2008.

And if you are at
Lift'08
this week, I won't mind talking about Helma there either :-)

Coincidence has it that there is even more server-side Javascript news right now: Jaxer

It is basically Mozilla running behind Apache on the server-side, extended with the server-side functionality you would expect, like reading/writing files, db access and other external communication. But since the server-side runs inside a full fledged browser environment, with not only the DOM but CSS and all the client-side js functionality, including XMLHTTP requests and the whole bit, you can really work on both sides with less mental switching.

Maybe sometimes it really helps to see both the client-side and server-sider code together like this, without the need to switch between separate files for views and controls. That's something to keep in mind for Jhino. With the older versions of Openmocha you always had the server-side and client-side code together on one page when using the web-based editor. With Jhino we currently lost that. So, this is one good argument to bring back a gui editor where one can see all the properties and behaviors of a Mocha object at a glance.

I'm not sure how often it will really make sense to run the code on both the client and server side. I hope we will come up with some interesting use cases for this, because the idea is intriguing!

The e4xd sub-project provides the javascript server-side for
the Openmocha project, a javascript application server with a
"soft-coding" framework.

The soft-coding allows modifications and development work from the
"inside" of the running web application. The behavior of the web
application can be changed in ways that closely relates to the
hierarchical content structure of the resulting website, without
the need to "hard-code" these changes in code files.

Every content object becomes "sovereign" and can define its own
behavior, overriding what it would inherit from the hard-coded
prototypes or from other soft-coded objects higher up in the
content structure hierarchy.

The e4xd objectengine leverages naming conventions for hard-coded
filenames and soft-coded object property names to overlay the
hard-coded and soft-coded properties and methods and determine
the behavior of an object at runtime.

Internally, these conventions follow the existing ones of the Helma
framework, but expand that philosophy, adding additional conventions
and accomodating to the needs of the soft-coding environment.

The jhino sub-project provides a base application scaffold for the
soft-coding environment. It leverages the e4xd object engine and adds
an additional layer of conventions, resulting in a basic scaffold
for a working base application with CRUD type functionality and
access control. Basically, jhino already provides a fully working
soft-coding environment, but requires the standard Helma development
tools such as the shell and inspector to do the actual "soft-coding".

The e4xd javascript server-side currently requires a patched version
of Helma and Rhino. In the case of Rhino, e4xd depends on the JOMP
patch and Helma needs to be modified to do the additional file suffix
mapping required by e4xd.

Prerequisites and System Requirements

To run OpenMocha a Java Virtual Machine 1.4 or better is required.

For FreeBSD and other operating systems with ports collection you may
install a JRE or JDK from the ports collection. For Windows, Linux and
Solaris you can get a Java runtime or development kit from
http://java.sun.com/j2se/downloads/. If you are on Mac OS X then you
already have a Java runtime that will work well with OpenMocha.

While you can integrate OpenMocha with other tools such as Apache
and MySQL, you do not have to. OpenMocha is pre-configured to be
deployed on its own and comes with a built-in object oriented
database and web server.

Getting started with OpenMocha

On the e4xd.org site, you should be able to find a working build to
download and simply start with ./start.sh

If the java command can not be found, make sure the JAVA_HOME
environment variable is set to the location of your Java installation.

With Helma running, you should be able to connect using your
browser and the URL http://127.0.0.1:8080/ or http://localhost:8080/

To initialize the setup, complete the user registration form
at http://127.0.0.1:8080/exampleapp/register and follow the
instructions to copy the security information into the
server.properties file. You may then login to your new OpenMocha
server via http://127.0.0.1:8080/exampleapp/login and start
configuring and deploying your web applications.

Installing jhino modules in a existing Helma setup

In addition to the full openmocha build, there is also a build that
contains only the jhino modules and patched jar files, in order to
add jhino to your own helma install. You would need to replace the
helma.jar and rhino.jar in your Helma install with the patched
versions. The "objectengine" and "jhino" modules are expected
to be placed in Helma's modules directory and the exampleapp would
normally go into Helma's apps directory. You could then start the
example app from your manage application or add it to the
apps.properties file to have it start automatically.

More info and help

Other than what you find on the (possibly not yet existing) e4xd.org
website, the best places to get in touch are the openmocha mailing
list and google group or the
#helma@irc.freenode.net IRC channel
.

Over the past days, I did some experimenting with the JOMP patch for Rhino and the mapping of additional filename extensions to HopObject properties. I probably took it a bit to far and made the list of supported file suffixes to long, even introducing duplicates, but I would like to propose supporting additional filename based conventions for Helma 1.7.

Maybe instead of adding direct built-in support for additional filename conventions to Helma, we could instead add functionality that would make it easy to script/configure such additional conventions as needed.

Besides a few new features, like the newly added res.resetBuffer() method and the ability to name type.properties files after their prototype, this update brings bug fixes in many different areas. See the
changelog
for the detailed list of fixes.

The new 1.6.1 version of Helma also includes an updated version of Rhino, with some E4X related fixes. The new packages now also include the
jala modules
and
updated documentation
.

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